I received an email through the website contact form from Carol Giles. Carol said some very nice things about my books (Yo! Go Carol!) and asks a very interesting question:“Can I ask,” says Carol, “what kind of material you used to gain this depth of knowledge of the 1920s? I would like to write a book set in 1930, but it's quite difficult to find out what day to day life was really like. There are academic books and ones about the interwar period, but getting information about one particular year is quite a challenge - any hints?”
There are two ways of answering this question – there’s far more than two, I suppose – but the first answer is lots and lots of relevant reading. However, it’s daunting to pick a year and simply decide to read about it. You could, I suppose, go to the nearest library which has newspapers stored (usually on microfilm) and, starting at January 1st, read through until December 31st. After which, you’d need professional help!
It’s obvious that some sort of focus is needed. Granted that there’s something which attracts you to a particular time, the chances are that a place comes bolted on, so to speak. So it’s not anywhere in the world in 1930, it’s New York, Manchester, the Welsh Valleys, the mid-West, the Deep South or Japan. Is there a key book or books which talks about your particular time and place? Try and find one written as close to your time as possible, and you’ll end up with To Kill A Mocking Bird, How Green Is My Valley, Of Mice and Men etc. One book should lead you to another and by the time you’ve read three or four, you should be getting quite a grip on your chosen time and place.
Granted that we’re talking about 1930, which is, in some ways, not so very long ago, I’d steer clear of historical novels written now and set in that period. You need to have a good handle on genuine contemporary attitudes before reading someone else’s take on them. (This doesn’t apply to all periods: if you want to study Imperial Rome, you’d be silly to ignore Robert Graves’ I Claudius and the other two Claudius books, but they need backing up with Suetonius, Tacitus etc.)
Now, as well as being interested in a particular place, you’re probably interested in a particular sort of person and – this being the research for a novel – the sort of problems they would have. Racing drivers? Read Tim Birkin’s Full Throttle. Hollywood? PG Wodehouse is excellent, so read his Hollywood stories (read him anyway – he’s wonderful!) but there’s plenty of memoirs. Grouchy disenchanted left-wingers with chips on their shoulders? Try George Orwell’s essays (again, try them anyway!) Grouchy, self-obsessed, middle-class women? Virginia Woolf is a must. Ordinary people affected by crime? Depending on where they live, try Raymond Chandler or Agatha Christie. Just at random to see what would happen I put Deep Sea Divers + 1930 into Google and came up with 24,500 hits. Now, most of them would be replicated but I got 1930s efforts of William Beebe and Otis Barton with the original bathysphere. So that’s two names, a challenge and a machine to go at.
The point is that when you’re writing a book you’re on a journey. Figure to yourself, as Hercule Poirot would say, that you want to make a journey, to go on holiday, in fact. (But this isn’t fact, it’s fiction, so you can go anywhere in the world!) Now, say you’ve always wanted to visit London/the Amazon/add your own name here. You’ll know something about it, otherwise you wouldn’t want to go there. Find out a bit more; talk to the travel agent, talk to people who’ve been, read about it. That’ll give you a particular destination. Find about yet more about your chosen destination. Think of the sort of things you’d like to do there. (Beach, night-clubs, hack your way through impenetrable jungle). Pack. Go. You see what I mean? Before you start, whether it’s the holiday or writing the book, you’ll have a pretty good idea of where you’re going and the sort of things you’re going to do once you’re there.
My latest book, As If By Magic, is out on the 28th June. Now Magic has a lot about aeroplanes in it. 
I bought the book. 
All About Aircraft of Today was awarded, as the bookplate stuck inside the cover says, as a prize to one Alan Beedell of Fleet Road Central School as a reward for General Good Work in July 1921. I don’t think young Alan thought much of his prize. I had to slit the pages, which were still bound at the top, to read it. I thought the book was gold-dust. It contains (admittedly in fairly laborious prose) among other things, a detailed account of the Crossley aircraft factory which was in full production in the First World War in the nearby town of Stockport. I’d never heard of the Crossley factory before and there are no traces left that I could find. It doesn’t matter; Frederick Talbot had been there in 1917 and wrote a wonderful description. The Crossley factory was my particular place, my own chosen destination.
So, what would I do in the factory? Well, something to do with aeroplanes, obviously, and, as this is a novel, something big, something new, something that made that particular plane the most exciting thing going. I had other ideas in mind too, nothing to do with aircraft, but which could be married together to make a (please God, fingers crossed!) really exciting story. I read about them. I moved the location of the factory to suit the story – writing gives you the power to do exactly as you like (You can break the laws of physics, Captain!) and - I wrote the book. (And then spent ages re-writing the damn thing, but that’s too tedious to talk about!) I was so grateful to Frederick Talbot I gave him a walk-on part in As If By Magic as an aviation journalist which was, I imagine, what he did in real life.
Oh, and you could read How To Write Killer Historical Mysteries by Kathy Lynn Emerson as that’s an excellent book with lots of useful advice. Best of luck!
That's a fascinating and extremely useful summary of how to research a historical period. I like the idea of "going on a journey" very much. Interesting that you mention the Robert Graves Claudius books; they were what got me hooked on the Roman Empire when I read them as a teenager. I was already interested in the Romans having seen some of their ruins around where I lived - in York, for instance, and their excellent straight (well mostly!) roads, many of which are such perfect routes for getting from A to B that they are still roads to this day. But when I read I CLAUDIUS...well, that did it! Mind you, I'm sure you are right about the dangers of reading other people's historical novels that deal with a period you yourself are interested in, especially if you are just starting to research it. Robert Graves based his accounts of Claudius' rise to power on classical written sources, which he illuminated with his own wonderful imagination. If you're studying the period in any depth, you obviously need to go back to those written sources, to find out why Suetonius or Tacitus or whoever wrote as they did. And you need to remember that Graves' books tell us quite about about the 1930s, when they were written, as well as a great deal about Ancient Rome.
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